Send this article to your friend who still thinks the cloud is a good idea

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients.

That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages:

- You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A few clicks. Multiple AZs? Available in seconds.

- You're not paying up-front costs (vs. investing hundreds of dollars for buying server hardware) and everything is available right now [0]

- Peak-heavy loads can be a lot cheaper. Mostly irrelevant for you average compute load, but things are quite different if you need to train an LLM

- Many services are already certified according to all kinds of standards, which can be very useful depending on your customers

Also, engineering time and time in general can be expensive. If you are a solo entrepreneur or a slow growth company, you have a lot of engineering time for basically free. But in a quick growth or prototyping phase, not to speak of venture funding, things can be quite different. Buying engineering time for >150€/hour can quickly offset a lot of saving [1].

Does this apply to most companies? No. Obviously not. But the cloud is not too expensive - you're paying for stuff you don't need. That's an entirely different kind of error.

[0] Compared to the rack hosting setup described in the post. Hetzner, Linode, etc. do provide multiple AZs with dedicated servers.

[1] Just to be fair, debugging cloud errors can be time consuming, too, and experienced AWS engineers will not be cheaper. But an RDS instance with solid backups-equivalent will usually not amortize quickly, if you need to pay someone to set it up.

"To them, it’s way too convenient to be on AWS: not only it solves their problem, but it’s also a shiny object. It’s technically complex, it makes them look smart in front of other devs, "

why? why be so obnoxious to other people who you claim are being obnoxious to you. no need to read your blog post now/

I'm fully aware this is pedantic, but you can't save 10x. You can pay 1/10. You can save 90%. Your previous costs could have been 10x your current costs. But 10x is more by definition, not less. You can't save it.

This debate seems like a waste of time.

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk?

My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right hardware configuration would be for your business was tricky, and scaling different services independently was impossible. also having multi regional redundancy was rare (remember when squarespace was manually carrying buckets of petrol for generators up many flights of stairs to keeps servers online post sandy?[1]).

AWS fixed much of that. But maybe things have changed, and there's a new middleground that meaningfully improves on the experience?

[1] https://www.squarespace.com/press-coverage/2012-11-1-after-s...

Cheap shot maybe, but the fact that the page takes 10 seconds to load when it hits the HN front page is a great, inadvertant illustration of why you might want to use the cloud sometimes.

The author touches on it briefly, but I'd argue that the cloud is immensely helpful for building (and tearing down) an MVP or proving an early market for a new company using startup credits or free tiers offered by all vendors. Once a business model has been proven, individual components and the underlying infrastructure can be moved out of the cloud as soon as cost becomes a concern.

This means that teams must make an up-front architectural decision to develop apps in a server-agnostic manner, and developers must stay disciplined to keep components portable from day one, but you can get a lot of mileage out of free credits without burning dollars on any infrastructure. The biggest challenge becomes finding the time to perform these migrations among other competing priorities, such as new feature development, especially if you're growing fast.

Our startup is mostly built on Google Cloud, but I don't think our sales rep is very happy with how little we spend or that we're unwilling to "commit" to spending. The ability to move off of the cloud, or even just to another cloud, provides a lot of leverage in the negotiating seat.

Cloud vendors can also lead to an easier risk/SLA conversation for downstream customers. Depending on your business, enterprise users like to see SLAs and data privacy laws respected around the globe, and cloud providers make it easy to say "not my problem" if things are structured correctly.

Fittingly, his website was hugged to death

I would really be interested in an actual comparison, where e.g. someone compares the full TCO of a mysql server with backup, hot standby in another data center and admin costs.

On AWS an Aurora RDS is not cheap. But I don't have to spend time or money on an admin.

Is the cost justified? Because that's what cloud is. Not even talking about the level of compliance I get from having every layer encrypted when my hosted box is just a screwdriver away from data getting out the old school way.

When I'm small enough or big enough, self managed makes sense and probably is cheaper. But when getting the right people with enough redundancy and knowledge is getting the expensive part...

But actually - I've never seen this in any if these arguments so far. Probably because actual time required to manage a db server is really unpredictable.

I've been at too many startups with a devops team that would rather provision 15 machines with 4GB RAM THAN ONE WITH 64GB.

I once got into an argument with a lead architect about it and it's really easy to twist the conversation into "don't you think we'll reach that scale?" To justify complexity.

The bottom line is for better or worse, the cloud and micro services are keeping a lot of jobs relevant and there's no benefit in convincing people otherwise

What I always say when given a false choice: ¿porque no las dos?

vcpu, iops, transfer fees, storage -- they are all resources going into a pool .

If Hetzner is giving you 10TB for $100 , then host your static files/images there and save $800.

Apps are very modular. You have services, asyncs, LBs, static files . Just put the compute where it is most cost effective.

You don't have to close your AWS account to stick it to the man. Like any utility, just move your resources to where they are most affordable.

If you’re going to write a post about why self-hosting is better than cloud*, then it’s probably a good idea to make sure your site loads in under a minute.

* at least I assume what this post is; I’m still waiting for it to load.

The cloud is a good idea. It becomes a bad idea when it is the only thing you know or, most likely, is the only cloud you know.